Les Douches Gallery in Paris is exhibiting Jean-Christophe Béchet’s photographs, to show the evolution of the photographer’s eye over the last thirty years.
My interest in Europe started in 1991 in Moscow. I witnessed the coup d’état that overturned Mikhaïl Gorbachev and signaled the end of the USSR. I knew that our “old” continent was coming into a new era. Over the course of my travels, I decided to keep a visual chronicle. I learned about the relativity of notions and borders, I felt the weight of climate and personal stories, I was interested in myths and those who perpetuate them (writers, musicians, poets, and artists). Over the years, I felt more and more “European”, but I also saw a resurfacing of scars from an unresolved political past and the questionable promises of a common, hypothetical future. I sensed a fragile world with deeper and deeper fissures. An uncertain space where all our contemporary contradictions crystalized.
My photographs narrate a journey, that of a generation which believed in the end of borders and the end of nationalisms. A generation which probably failed because it was too idealist, too sensitive to symbols, too forgetful about daily realities. To periods of crisis and current affaires I preferred the “long term”, more literary in aimless travels, improvised encounters, forgotten spaces, and uncertain atmospheres. European Vintage is a re-reading of my book European Puzzle which offers, in 220 images, a complex assembly of street scenes, portraits, and landscapes. The visions were captured in the flow of reality, often on the spot. In color as well as black and white, I attached the same amount of importance to architecture as I did to humans, to climate as to light, to little trivial happenings as to historical moments. A sinuous and silent path unfolds, mixing documentary spirit with poetic temptation…
Jean-Christophe Béchet
Jean-Christophe Béchet, European Vintage
From June 8 through July 29, 2017
Galerie Les Douches
5, rue Legouvé
75010 Paris
France
